Intrusion Prevention 101
Reducing a computer’s vulnerability to hackers is much like using anti-theft devices and common sense to guard against your car being broken into.
Strangely, few people would leave their keys in the ignition while away from their vehicle, yet most might as well hand over their workstations and servers to the lowliest hacker as they don’t have any security in place.
Just like vehicle protection measures, you can stop a lot of potential intruders but never all. Most hackers are of the “script kiddie” variety, non-programmers using commonly available hacker tools to penetrate systems if only for their own amusement. Since their skills are limited, they hunt for the easy kill rather than a challenge, so our mission here is to make your computer as unattractive as possible. The rules outlined below are a checklist of things you must do to properly secure your system. At the end of this article you’ll find useful links that will help you actually implement these measures.
Rule 1: Mind your passwords. It is simply incredible that in this day and age most computer users persist in choosing the weakest passwords, typically because they’re easy to remember. Forget convenience: Under no circumstance should you ever use real words or combinations of real words, nor should you use numbers that have any significance to you such as your birth date. Script kiddies will use password guessing tools and it might take only seconds to guess yours. Additionally, using the same or similar password everywhere is foolish, sort of like leaving your credit cards and house keys in your car! The best policy is to use random sequences of characters for passwords.
Rule 2: Use encrypted connections. The Internet tools most commonly used on workstations and servers are inherently insecure. For instance, never use the popular Telnet, POP, or FTP programs unless passwords are passed in a strongly encrypted format over the Internet. Sadly, authentication is typically in plain text, which makes life easy for hackers using packet sniffers to automatically grab scores of plain text passwords from Internet noise while they sleep. Remote shell sessions such as with telnet should be completely encrypted if you use such sessions to switch to other userids or root id, lest you want to give script kiddies a big break! SSH is the best substitute for Telnet and can also be used instead of FTP. By the same token, sensitive information should NEVER be sent via email. Note that any encryption between client and server requires that both ends support the encryption method.
Rule 3: Hide! Cloaking your computer’s Internet presence via a firewall is the first line of defense. All hackers use scanning tools to quickly find weaknesses in a computer’s Internet interfaces. Firewalls work at the packet level and not only can detect scan attempts but also block them, thus making your system look unattractive or even hide its existence altogether.
Rule 4 : Don’t trust anybody! Be very careful about what programs you download from the Internet. Do not install software from little known sites especially. Programs can hide “trojans” that once launched will modify your system and/or connect to remote servers without your knowledge, perhaps allowing hackers to slip into your system. Nowadays, most download sites will include a checksum, typically PGP or MD5 encoded, which can be used to verify that the program is authentic before you install it. It’s not too paranoid to make it a rule to never trust anything from the Internet, as even the biggest website could be subverted by hackers and you wouldn’t notice.
Rule 5: If you’re managing a server, limit what other users can do on the system. From limiting them to certain areas of the filesystem and which applications they can run to limiting their memory and process usage, there are many things you can do to reduce the serious risk posed by reckless users.
Rule 6: Keep your system up to date. Vulnerabilities are continuously being found in popular programs and operating system kernels, some of which might allow an intruder to gain root access to your system. Unfortunately, word of such “holes” travels quickly in hackerdom, so it’s important to be on top of them yourself. Software creators post “patches” and/or new versions of their programs to fix those defects. It’s hard to keep track of them all, but you can save yourself a lot of grief by subscribing to mailing lists that warn you of such incidents. Again, software producers often maintain such lists themselves, as do sites specializing in computer security, and it’s usually free to subscribe. You can also reduce the risks by avoiding using new applications or those that a long history of vulnerabilities.
Rule 7: Disconnect from the Internet when you’re not actually using it. This is the ultimate protection to stop intrusions, but of course it doesn’t stop trojans unless you literally unplug your physical connection. In the case of servers, where your connection is always on, disable any daemons that aren’t needed or seldom used. Note that the daemons running by default on a newly installed operating system are quite often the most vulnerable, and most hosting services won’t bother to disable them for you.
Rule 8: Don’t continue using a computer that you know has been compromised by hackers. To do so allows the hacker to potentially gain access to more systems and exposes you to the possible theft of some of your sensitive data. The only solution is to reformat the hard disk(s) and re-install the operating system, or smash your computer to bits if you prefer!
Rule 9: Use every security mechanism you can, not just one or a few. They serve different purposes and thus complement each other. Always rolling-up the car windows and locking the doors is a good start, but you wouldn’t really call that a security system, would you?!
Stick to the rules or let the script kiddies rule the day!
Some useful links you can follow to get further knowledge on the subjects discussed today:
SSH:
http://www.ssh.com
http://www.openssh.org
http://www.fsecure.com
Vulnerability reports:
http://www.securityfocus.org
http://cve.mitre.org
Firewalls:
http://www.zonelabs.com
http://www.firewallguide.com
Hacking:
Yahoo! Directory of Hacking
Tom Germain has been our ace programmer here at www.murdok.org. He has
expertise in several different languages and operating systems.
Basically, he’s just a geek stud.
